Amazon’s line of Fire tablets are great, all-purpose devices for browsing and streaming – especially for shoppers who want to stay away from the big bucks of more powerful devices like Apple iPads and Samsung Tabs.
It also doubles up as an e-reader, though dedicated book-lovers should gravitate towards the retailer’s Kindle range.
The Fire HD 10 is perfect for watching, reading, and gaming, and it’s 25% faster than the old model.
Basically, its engine got a major upgrade – it now has a powerful processor and 3 GB of RAM, which helps everything run super-smoothly.
You get awesome HD entertainment on a big 10.1-inch screen that makes all your games and shows look great with brilliant colour.
(By the way, if you want something smaller and cheaper, the 8-inch Fire HD 8 is also on sale for just £49.99.)
The tablet has serious stamina: you can binge-watch for up to 13 hours without needing to plug into its charger.
The tablet is durable, too, with a strengthened screen that Amazon claims to to be 2.7 times tougher than the Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 (2022) in a drop test.
Need a good device to chat with friends and family? The 5MP front camera is way better for video calls than squinting at your small phone screen.
For storage, it comes with 32GB or 64GB of space, which is expandable by up to 1TB with a separate microSD card.
And this being an Amazon gadget, you can operate it via Alexa – it can help you out with streaming videos, relaying the latest news and controlling other smart devices in the same connected ecosystem.
Amazon Prime Day: early Fire Tablet Deals
Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet (newest gen), £69.99 (was £149.99) – buy here
Amazon Fire Max 11 tablet (newest gen), £129.99 (was £249.99) – buy here
Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet (newest gen), £49.99 (was £99.99) – buy here
Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids Pro tablet (newest gen), £79.99 (was £159.99) – buy here
Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids tablet (newest gen), £69.99 (was £149.99) – buy here
“The Amazon Fire HD 10 is a fantastic budget-friendly tablet,” writes one shopper.
“The 10.1-inch screen is bright and clear, perfect for watching videos, reading, or browsing.
“The battery easily lasts up to 13 hours – ideal for all-day use.”
Another delighted customer added: “Quality item… I can’t get over the size of the screen, it’s 10 inches but looks bigger.
“The tablet is lightning-fast, and it does everything that I expect from an Amazon Fire… Well worth the investment.”
A lot more deals are on the way when the Prime Big Deal Days sale starts next week, and it’s worth keeping in mind that these early device deals might become exclusively for Prime members.
So, while this current deal is marked on the Amazon site as ending on October 14th, it’s not impossible it will only be available for Amazon Prime members soon.
Anyone without a Prime account who’s interested shouldn’t hold off for too long on buying.
Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet, £69.99 (was £149.99)
Make sure you bookmark our best Amazon Prime Day deals page, where we’ll be listing all the top bargains when the two-day sale kicks off.
For our top pick of smart gadgets available to snap up right now, head to our Amazon device deals page.
Amazon Prime Day: the 10 best early deals
The Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sale doesn’t kick off until next week (7th-8th October), but there’s already some early deals to snap up.
*If you click on a link in this boxout we will earn affiliate revenue
Blink Smart Camera & Doorbell bundle, £31.49 (was £119.98) – buy here
Poounur Fitness Smartwatch, £23.99 (was £129.99) – buy here
Hangsun 12L/Day Dehumidifier, £88.38 (was £118.98) – buy here
LKOUY Portable Charger, £12.99 (was £59.99) – buy here
Slumberdown Feels Like Down King Size Duvet, £21.56 (was £31.19) – buy here
The chips – made by US firm Qualcomm – are already among the most powerful around, used in phones by Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi and more.
These are essential for the smooth running of devices and power consumption among other things.
Every year, Qualcomm announces start-of-the-art chip enhancements at a huge Snapdragon Summit event in Hawaii.
We were invited along to see what’s in store and for 2025 bosses revealed the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
Qualcomm says it is the fastest mobile system on-a-chip.
It means users can expect “lightning-fast” multitasking and seamless app switching so you can have loads open at once without causing major sluggish performance.
The upgrade is also good news for gamers, with “incredible performance and power efficiency”.
And in a mobile landscape increasingly filled with AI apps and tools, the new chip can better understand and learn from your habits to provide more useful personalised recommendations – and better still, it’s all handled on the device, so no data is sent off.
Qualcomm claims the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 boosts performance by 20 per cent compared to its last Snapdragon 8 Elite chip.
“With Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, you are at the center of your mobile experience,” said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handset, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
“It enables personalized AI agents to see what you see, hear what you hear and think with you in real time.
“Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 pushes the boundaries of personal AI, allowing you to experience the future of mobile technology today.”
The new chip is expected to appear on flagship smartphones from a number of huge names, including:
Honor
iQOO
Nubia
OnePlus
OPPO
POCO
Realme
REDMI
RedMagic
ROG
Samsung
Sony
Vivo
Xiaomi
ZTE
Qualcomm teased that new devices will be launched with the chip in the coming days.
Must-know Android tips to boost your phone
Get the most out of your Android smartphone with these little-known hacks:
In an evening social media post about a supremely partisan battle that could reshape American political power for generations, President Trump sounded ebullient.
“Big WIN for the Great State of Texas!!! Everything Passed, on our way to FIVE more Congressional seats and saving your Rights, your Freedoms, and your Country, itself,” Trump wrote, of the nation’s most populous red state pushing a mid-decade redistricting plan designed to win more Republican seats in Congress and protect Trump’s power through the 2026 midterms.
“Texas never lets us down. Florida, Indiana, and others are looking to do the same thing,” Trump wrote — nodding to a potential proliferation of such efforts across the country.
The next day, Gov. Gavin Newsom — projecting a fresh swagger as Trump’s chief antagonist on the issue — stood with fellow lawmakers from the nation’s most populous blue state to announce their own legislative success in putting to voters a redrawn congressional map for California that strongly favors Democrats.
“We got here because the president of the United States is one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history,” Newsom said, couching the California effort as defensive rather than offensive. “We got here because he recognizes that he will lose the election, [and that] Congress will go back into the hands of the Democratic Party next November.”
In the last week, with lightning speed, the nation’s foremost political leaders have jettisoned any pretense of political fairness — any notion of voters being equal or elected representatives reflecting their constituencies — in favor of an all-out partisan war for power that has some politicians and many political observers concerned for the future of American democracy.
“America is headed towards true authoritarian rule if people do not stand up,” Texas state Rep. Gene Wu, a Democrat from the Houston area, said Friday on a call with reporters.
The race to redistrict began with Trump, whose approval ratings have plummeted, pressuring Texas to manipulate maps to secure more House seats for Republicans so he wouldn’t face a hostile House majority in the second half of his second term. It escalated when Newsom and other California leaders said they wouldn’t stand idly by and started working to put a new map of their own on the November ballot — formally asking voters to jettison the state’s independent redistricting commission to counter Trump’s gambit in Texas.
Those two states alone are home to some 70 million Americans, but the fight is hardly limited there. As Trump suggested, other states are also eyeing whether to redraw lines — raising the prospect of a country divided between blue and red power centers more than ever before, and the voice of millions of minority-party voters being all but erased in the halls of Congress.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom answers questions on Thursday after signing legislation calling for a special election on a redrawn congressional map.
(Godofredo A. Vásquez / Associated Press)
Of course, gerrymandering is not new, and already exists in many states across the country. But the bold, unapologetic and bipartisan bent of the latest redistricting race is something new and different, experts said. It is a clear product of Trump’s new America, where political warfare is increasingly untethered to — and unbound by — long-standing political norms, and where leaders of both political parties seem increasingly willing to toss aside pretense and politeness in order to pursue power.
Trump on the campaign trail promised a new “Golden Age,” and he has long said his goal is to return America to some purportedly greater, more aspirational and proud past. But he has also signaled, repeatedly and with hardly any ambiguity, an intention to manipulate the political system to further empower himself and his fellow Republicans — whether through redistricting, ending mail-in ballots, or other measures aimed at curtailing voter turnout.
“In four years, you don’t have to vote again,” Trump told a crowd of evangelical Christians a little over a year ago, in the thick of his presidential campaign. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”
‘No democracy left’
The redistricting war has dominated political news for weeks now, given its potential implications for reshaping Congress and further emboldening Trump in his second term.
Sam Wang, president of the Electoral Innovation Lab at Princeton University, has studied gerrymandering for years, but said during the media call with Wu that he has never received more inquiries than in the last few weeks, when his inbox has filled with questions from media around the world.
Wang said gerrymandering reached a high point more than a decade ago, but had been subsiding due to court battles and state legislatures establishing independent commissions to draw district lines.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott defends his state’s redistricting move while calling California’s “a joke.”
(Eric Gay / Associated Press)
Now, however, the efforts of Texas and California are threatening that progress and pushing things “to a new low point,” he said — leaving some voters feeling disenfranchised and Wang worried about further erosion of voter protections under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which he said the conservative Supreme Court may be preparing to weaken.
Wu said allowing politicians to redraw congressional lines whenever they want in order to “make sure that they never lose” sets a dangerous precedent that will especially disenfranchise minority voters — because “politicians and leaders would no longer listen to the people.”
“There would be no democracy left,” he said.
That said, Wu drew a sharp distinction between Texas Republicans unilaterally redrawing maps to their and Trump’s advantage — in part by “hacking” apart minority populations — and California asking voters to counteract that power grab with a new map of their own.
“California is defending the nation,” he said. “Texas is doing something illegal.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday took the opposition position, saying Texas’ new map was constitutional while California’s was “a joke” and likely to be overturned. He also hinted at further efforts in other Republican-led states to add more House seats for the party.
“Republicans are not finished in the United States,” Abbott said.
Two legal experts on the call expressed grave concerns with such partisanship — especially in Texas.
Sara Rohani, assistant counsel with the Legal Defense Fund, or LDF, said her organization has been fighting for decades to ensure that the promises of the Voting Rights Act for Black and other minority groups aren’t infringed upon by unscrupulous and racist political leaders in search of power.
“Fair representation isn’t optional in this country. It’s the right of all Americans to [have] equal voting power,” she said.
That said, “voters of color have been excluded” from that promise consistently, both before and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and “in 2025, it’s clear that our fight for fair maps continues,” Rohani said.
Major victories have been won in the courts in recent years in states such as Alabama and Louisiana, and those battles are only going to continue, she said. Asked specifically if her group is preparing to sue over Texas’ maps, Rohani demurred — but didn’t back down, saying LDF will get involved “in any jurisdiction where Black voters are being targeted.”
Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said there are definitely going to be challenges to Texas’ maps.
By their own admission, Saenz said, Texas lawmakers redrew their maps in 2021 in order to maximize Republican advantage in congressional races — with the only limits being those imposed by the Voting Rights Act. That means in order to gain even more seats now, “they have to violate the Voting Rights Act,” he said.
Texas Republicans have argued that they are acting in part in response to a warning from the Justice Department that their current maps, from 2021, are unlawful. But Saenz noted that the Justice Department dropped a lawsuit challenging those maps when Trump took office — meaning any threats to sue again are an empty ploy and “clearly orchestrated with one objective: Donald Trump’s objective.”
Is there a legal case?
The fate of any legal challenges to the redistricting efforts is unclear, in part because gerrymandering has become much harder to challenge in court.
In 2019, the Supreme Court threw out claims that highly partisan state election maps are unconstitutional. Chief Justice John G. Roberts said such district-by-district line drawing “presents political questions” and there are no reliable “legal standards” for deciding what is fair and just.
It was not a new view for Roberts.
In 2006, shortly after he joined the court, the justices rejected a challenge to a mid-decade redistricting engineered by Texas Republicans, but ordered the state — over Roberts’ dissent — to redraw one of its majority-Latino districts to transfer some of its voters to another Latino-leaning district.
Roberts expressed his frustration at the time, writing that it “is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”
Some legal experts say the new Texas redistricting could face a legal challenge if Black or Latino lawmakers are in danger of losing their seats. But the Supreme Court conservatives are skeptical of such claims — and have given signs they may shrink the scope of the Voting Rights Act.
In March, the justices considered a Louisiana case to decide if the state must create a second congressional district that would elect a Black candidate to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and if so, how it should be drawn.
But the court failed to issue a decision. Instead, on Aug. 1, the court said it would hear further arguments this fall on “whether the state’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority Congressional district” violates the Constitution.
Justice Clarence Thomas has long argued it is unconstitutional to draw election districts based on racial lines, regardless of the Voting Rights Act, and he may now have a majority that agrees with him.
If so, such a ruling could squelch discrimination claims from Black and Latino lawmakers in Texas or elsewhere — further clearing the path for partisan gerrymandering.
Looking ahead
Given the intensity of the battle and the uncertainty of the related legal challenges, few of America’s top political leaders are thinking to the future. They’re fighting in the present — focused on swaying public perception.
In a YouTube Live video with thousands of supporters on Thursday, Newsom said Trump “doesn’t believe in the rule of law — he believes in the rule of Don; period, full stop,” and that he hoped it was “dawning on more and more Americans what’s at stake.”
Newsom said that when Trump “made the phone call to rig the elections to Greg Abbott in Texas,” he expected Democrats to just roll over and take it. In response, he said, Democrats have to stop thinking about “whether or not we should play hardball,” and start focusing on “how we play hardball.”
On Friday, Newsom said he was “very proud of the Legislature for moving quickly” to counter Texas, and that he is confident voters will support the ballot measure to change the state’s maps despite polls showing a sluggish start to the campaign.
A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, conducted for The Times, found 48% of voters said they would cast ballots in favor of temporary gerrymandering efforts, though 20% were undecided.
Asked if he is encouraging Democratic leaders in other states to revisit their own maps, Newsom said he appreciated both Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signaling that they may be willing to do just that.
“I do believe that the actions of [the California] Legislature will inspire other legislative leaders to … meet this moment, to save this democracy and to stop this authoritarian and his continued actions to literally vandalize and gut our Constitution and our democratic principles,” Newsom said.
